him?” Kaulcrick asked, his voice starting to rise. No one answered. “Does anyone have him!”
Again all the radios were silent. The tech agent said, “He’s turned onto West Second Street.”
“One-four,” Kaulcrick called, “have you caught up to him?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“One-one, flood that area with your people. Find him. And that bag.”
TEN
VAIL STEPPED DOWN, BUT HIS FOOT COULDN’T FIND THE NEXT RUNG, so he reached twice as far, thinking maybe they had cut off a rung hoping to get him to slip and fall onto the punji boards, but he couldn’t find the next one either. Apparently, they had cut the rest of them off.
So he was unable to go up or down. Then he remembered the agent in the underground chamber at the naval prison, seemingly trapped, but a means, although not obvious, had been left for him: the length of webbing. The reason for the maintenance hatch had been to service the overhead cables that had once carried the electricity to power the trolley cars. He climbed as high as he could on the rungs and ran his hand out toward the center of the tunnel until it hit a braided steel cable. It was about an inch and a half thick, and he wrapped his free hand around it, pulling to test its ability to hold him and the extra seventy pounds of money. Satisfied it would, he let go of the ladder rung and swung out over the twenty-foot drop. Hand over hand he proceeded, testing each new forward grasp to make sure it would hold him before committing his weight.
KAULCRICK BARKED into the radio, “Can anyone see where he is?”
Again, the only response was silence. Suddenly, the tech agent said, “He must have gotten into a vehicle. The transmitter is moving at a car rate of speed now. He just got onto the 110 northbound.”
“Did you hear that, One-one?” Kaulcrick asked the surveillance supervisor.
“I’ve got cars heading that way.”
HANGING TWENTY FEET in the air, Vail had traveled about eighty feet horizontally along the electrical cable that paralleled the tunnel floor, which he had to assume was still covered with punji boards. His shoulders and arms were beginning to burn with fatigue. He blocked it out and went another thirty feet before the pain had all but paralyzed him. Suddenly it no longer mattered—he had run out of cable. Unable to go back or forward, he had no choice but to drop to the floor. Were the boards under him? Willing up what little strength remained, he screwed his grip around the cable with his right hand and pulled the bag across his head with the left, dropping it into the darkness with as much accuracy as possible directly below him. He hung for a moment longer trying to readjust his balance in the dark without the extra weight. In the event the floor was still booby-trapped, he was going to try to drop directly on top of the bag without falling off and onto any of the surrounding nailed boards.
From the way he had released the bag, he calculated it was a foot or so off to his left. Swinging slightly to his left, he let go and fell the remaining fifteen feet, hitting the bag with both feet at the same time. But the currency inside had shifted during his “walk,” so he fell off farther to the left. As he lost his balance, he prepared for the pain of the nails as he hit the floor, but the spiked boards weren’t there. Instead he hit the earthen floor.
He shuffled his feet around to explore the ground, but there were no more boards. He picked up the bag and found two boards stuck to it. Directly under the cable, the floor had been booby-trapped, but not to the sides. That meant he was supposed to pierce his feet only. While that would incapacitate him, he would still be able to deliver the money. He examined the bag and discovered that the Pentad’s overkill approach had paid an unexpected dividend: the GPS sewn into the bottom of the bag had been pierced and probably rendered inoperable.
Something scampered along the wall. Vail hoped it was only rats. But then he thought about how if he had landed on the nails, he would now be leaving a bloody trail for whatever it was to follow. Up ahead, he could see another of the Pentad’s luminescent arrows, leading to, he was relatively certain, some other unpleasantry.
“HE’S LEFT THE 110